Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the celebrated Russian writer, has been laid to rest after a funeral service held at Moscow's historic Donskoi monastery earlier today.

The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, were among the mourners who joined the Nobel laureate's family and friends for the service in the monastery's cathedral.

After the Russian Orthodox ceremony,which included goose-stepping honour guards and a choir singing dirges, his flower-strewn casket was carried to a grave in the cathedral's cemetery preceded by a uniformed soldier carrying a huge photograph of the man.

At the graveside a priest said prayers and blessed his body before sprinkling it with frankincense. Relatives kissed his forehead before the coffin was sealed and interred.

He was buried in accordance with his will in the monastery grounds, where Russian cultural figures have been laid to rest since the 18th century.

According to observers, the service bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral, including a military band and a gun salute.

Earlier in the day, the Russian public paid tribute to the author, who died from heart failure on Sunday aged 89.

Flanked by his widow, Natalya, two sons Stepan and Yermolai, and a military guard, his body lay in an open coffin inside the Russian Academy of sciences, as thousands of mourners trouped past offering their condolences and placing flowers on the floor by the coffin.

Solzhenitsyn came to prominence with his books The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which exposed Stalin's brutal prison system and forced him into 20 years of exile from the former Soviet Union.